[200] For the state of this squadron see the report by Admiral De Courcy in the Parliamentary Papers for 1809, Spain, March 29, 1809, p. 4.
[201] The marines had been taken away in July, 1808, and formed half a brigade in the division of the Army of Galicia. But the seamen were available.
[202] The Supreme Junta very properly condemned him and Alcedo, the governor of Corunna, to the penalties of high treason.
[203] Compare Instructions de l’Empereur of Jan. 17, with Berthier to Soult of Jan. 21.
[204] ‘Il faut croire,’ says St. Chamans, Soult’s senior aide-de-camp, ‘que Napoléon, au moment où il ordonna une pareille opération, était possédé d’un esprit de vertige. Comment pouvait-il risquer, au milieu d’un royaume insurgé, un si faible corps d’armée, sans communication avec ses autres troupes d’Espagne?’ [Mémoires, p. 117]. ‘Tout était en erreur,’ says Le Noble, another 2nd Corps writer, ‘dans le projet de soumettre le Portugal en 1809 avec une armée si faible et dépourvue de moyens. L’Empereur a montré une confiance aveugle’ (p. 65).
[205] The authors, English and French, who express a humanitarian horror at the shooting of 3,000 horses and mules before the embarkation of Moore’s army, forget what a godsend these would have been to Soult, if the English had left them to fall intact into his hands. The slaughter was dreadful, but perfectly necessary and justifiable.
[206] All these details come from Le Noble, who as Ordonnateur-en-Chef of the 2nd Corps, had full experience of the difficulty of equipping it for the Portuguese expedition.
[207] Most of these details are from two interesting dispatches of La Romana in the Foreign Office papers at the Record Office. They are dated from Chaves on Jan. 28 and Feb. 13. They are unpublished and seem to be unknown even to General Arteche, who has made such a splendid collection of the materials in the Spanish archives which bear on this obscure corner of the war. There was an English officer, Captain Brotherton, with the army of La Romana: but his reports, which Napier had evidently seen, are now no longer to be found. No doubt they were bound up in the January-March 1809 book of Portuguese dispatches, which since Napier’s day has disappeared from the Record Office, leaving no trace behind.
[208] These boats were brought to Campo Saucos overland, for a full mile and more. They came from La Guardia and other fishing-villages on the coast; but finding it impossible to get them over the bar of the Minho in such furious weather, and against the swollen stream, Soult dragged them from the beach north of the mouth to the crossing-point on rollers, much as Mohammed II did with his galleys at the famous siege of Constantinople in 1453. But Soult’s vessels were, of course, much smaller.
[209] Soult had got together a few dozen seamen, French prisoners of war, found at Corunna and Ferrol, who had been captured at sea by Spanish cruisers. They were not ‘marines’ as Napier calls them (ii. 38), but marins (see Le Noble, p. 75, and again p. 78).